Virginia Magic Ways: The Cavalier Obsession with Fortune

In most seventeenth-century cultures, religion was closely linked to what the modern world calls magic. Virginians were deeply interested in magic—even obsessed by it. But the quality of their obsession was not the same as in Massachusetts. In the Chesapeake colonies, there as nothing like the Puritans’ concern with witchcraft. No person was ever executed in Virginia for that offense.¹ Instead, the courts actively punished false accusations of witchcraft, often assessing heavy fines and costs against those who denounced their neighbors as minions of the Devil. Many denunciations were indeed brought forward by people of low estate, particularly during the decade of the 1650s which was a painful and uncertain period in the colony. But Virginia’s ruling elite had little sympathy for witchcraft prosecutions, and actively discouraged them in a manner very different from the ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts.²

This distaste for witchcraft persecutions had also appeared among the Royalist gentry of southern England. As early as 1653, Sir Robert Filmer published a polemic against capital punishment for witchcraft. He argued that the biblical injunction, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” had no jurisdiction in England but applied only to Jewish witches. The Manichean conception of the world which so haunted the Puritans had comparatively little part in Filmer’s thinking, or in that of Virginia’s gentry.³

At the same time, however, Virginians were much interested in other forms of magic which had comparatively little meaning (or a different meaning) for the people of New England. The gentlemen of Virginia were deeply absorbed in the study of stars, planets, spheres, and portents—not as signs of God’s purpose but as clues to their own fate. They believed that every man possessed a certain fixed quality called fortune, which could be understood by knowledge of these things. This idea had been widely accepted in Elizabethan England.⁴

Many gentlemen kept “fortune books,” which were collections of magical and astrological lore for good luck in love, marriage, sex, health, travel. One such fortune book included an entire chapter on marriage with entries on “whether a man shall marry, the time of marriage, how many husbands a woman shall have, who shall be master of the two, how they shall agree after marriage, and whether the man or his wife shall die first, and the time when.”⁵

This cult of fortuna implied that life was a game of chance in which the odds were rigged by mysterious powers in the universe.

A Devon gentleman named Samuel Watts noted in his commonplace book:

Love is a play at table where the dye

Of maides affection doth by fancy fly

If that you take her fancy at a blot

Tis ten to one, if straight you enter not⁶

Another example was the English autobiography of John Holden (1691-1730), a fascinating chronicle in which entries for each year culminated in an anniversary verse that testified to the sway of fortune over individual life:

Something presents itself in ev’ry year

That puts so often between hope and fear;

Makes so uneasy in a doubtful state

To know how fortune will decree or fate. …

Great things were moved this septinary year

Tho’ little but the fruits of love appear

Yet time may soon produce some great event

That nothing but ill fortune can prevent.⁷

This interest in fortune was linked to another striking characteristic of Virginians—their obsession with gambling. Virginians were observed to be constantly making wagers with one another on almost any imaginable outcome. The more uncertain the result, the more likely they were to gamble. They made bets not merely on horses, cards, cockfights and backgammon; but also on crops, prices, women and the weather. “They are all professional gamesters …,” a French traveler observed of Virginia’s gentry, “Colonel Byrd is never happy but when he has the box and dice in his hand.”⁸

Gambling had many meanings in the lives of Virginia planters. Historians have demonstrated that it was an expression of social status and a form of social bonding. But it was also something else. The cabalistic patterns that the dice made as they tumbled out of the box represented something more than merely an idle amusement, and something other than a form of status-striving. A gentleman’s dice were like the soothsayer’s bones from which they had descended—a clue to the cosmos, and a token of each individual’s place within it. If the Puritans searched desperately for signs of God’s redeeming providence in the world, the Virginians sought another sort of assurance about fortuna in their incessant gambling.

In Massachusetts gambling was strictly forbidden by law, and severely punished by the magistrates. It was condemned by Puritan moralists as not merely idleness but blasphemy. To John Cotton and Cotton Mather, gambling made a mockery of God’s presence in the world. The attitudes of Virginians were very different. Gambling was formally recognized and regulated by law. Betting was prohibited to those with “no visible estate, profession or calling to maintain themselves.” Courts enforced wagers as a form of contract, and required that gambling debts should be faithfully paid. Fraudulent gaming was ferociously punished, and the highest powers in the colony were invoked to secure honest games. This common law of wagering was an indication that gambling was more than merely a game in Virginia. It was a way of testing one’s fortuna.⁹

These attitudes were not invented in the New World. They had long existed among the gentry of the south and west of England, with whom gambling was also an obsession. The diary of the Dorset gentleman John Richards was also a betting book which became a running record of many small wagers with friends and acquaintances. Richards often set down the results of bets in which he had no personal stake, by other gentlemen who engaged compulsively in heavy and even ruinous wagers. He was as much interested inthe fortuna of others as of himself.¹⁰

Virginians of all ranks also showed still another interest in magic. On their house, they carved signs which were thought to bring the occupants good fortune. Some of these signs were very old—older than the sign of the cross. They had long appeared on buildings in the south and west of England, from whence so many Virginians came. These signs might be thought of as a sort of liturgy—that is, a ritual which was thought to be a way of propitiating the powers of fortune.¹¹

The magic of the Virginians was closely linked to their vernacular religion. To a modern mind these spheres of thought seem opposed, but in the seventeenth century they tended to blur into one another. In respect to both magic and religion, the beliefs of the Virginians tended to be less Manichean than did those of New Englanders. They were also less instrumental. The prevailing cosmology of the Chesapeake colony minimized man’s responsibility for his fate. The idea of fortune lay very near the heart of this culture.